On August 21, 1962 at about four in the afternoon, my mother gave birth to her fourth daughter and named her Priscilla Grace.  That was me.  Imagine growing up in the cool and hip 60s & 70s with a name like Priscilla.  Well, Mrs. Presley may have helped me out a bit, but since I was born in Massachusetts, my name sounded in my ears with all the Puritanical pizzazz of a rusty shoe buckle.  It wasn’t until I was naming my own children that I bothered to find out what the name means.  Of course, I knew it came from the Bible.   I knew it was Latin.  I didn’t know it meant ‘ancient’.  How flattering.  I am ancient in a dead language.  And my middle name, Grace, is intentionally theological but also implies 15 other definitions in dictionary.com.   For a little kid, it was a lot of name.

Well, I am no longer a little kid.  I am beginning my 50th year of life and will be celebrating it daily in this blog until its culmination, and possibly beyond.   I am thrilled to begin with naming a blog and a domain.  My parents never gave me a nickname.  I didn’t acquire one until a 3 year old who lived at a camp where I was employed as a college student started calling me “Scilla”.   It sounded so much more like me than “Pris” or the cringe-inducing “Prissy”.   So this blog is dubbed scillagrace to symbolize ancient elegance of manner, action, form, motion and moral strength.  It is my goal to post entries worthy of the name.  It is my goal to avoid being dogmatic and prissy.  I want to challenge myself to go deeper into subjects that explore the ancient grace of life.   It is a lot of name and a lot of subject, to be sure.  We’ll see how it goes.